2/26/2014
CONSCIENCE V. THE SUPREMES
GOAFS II: #83
CONSCIENCE v. THE
SUPREMES
2.26.14
'
In 1990, the conservative and Catholic
Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the majority opinion in Employment Division v. Smith, a case that concerned Native
Americans who had been denied employment benefits because they had used peyote
in their religious rituals. Scalia writes, “We have never held that an
individual’s religious beliefs excuse him from compliance with an otherwise
valid law prohibiting conduct that the State is free to regulate.”
Scalia
concludes, quoting an earlier Supreme Court decision, Reynolds v. United States (1878) “The right of free exercise does
not relieve an individual of the obligation to comply with a ‘valid and natural
law of general applicability on the ground that the law proscribes (or
prescribes) conduct that his religion prescribes (or proscribes).’”
It has been
generally agreed upon since the Declaration of Independence and the
Constitution were written that the pursuit of liberty is not an absolute
individual right. No one is free to shout “fire!” in a crowded theater unless
there is actually a fire. The location of the line between the interests of the
individual and the State has always been contested in one way or another but
these two cases suggest a prediction might be in order—mine is that neither the
Little Sisters of the Poor nor Hobby Lobby will prevail when their case or
cases come to the Supreme Court.
The essence
of these two decisions is that the State trumps the individual conscience
whenever it pleases for whatever reason it pleases. And it is not a new thing.
Chief Justice Roberts let conservatives down in the Obama Care decision.
Scalia, one of the staunchest friends of the Constitution and conservative
values, was not writing a dissenting opinion, he wrote the opinion for the
Court. So which way will these judges jump when the time comes. You can bet
that the two precedents above will be prominent in any case the State brings
where religious conscience is involved.
Consider the
contemporary context in which they operate. Progressive Liberal Ideology in
America today has its own religion of liberty. This religion is a purely civil
one that, at best, gives a nod to a God of nature of no discernable identity.
In reality, this religion establishes Liberty (in the garb of multicultural
political correctness) as its god, the Declaration of Independence and the
Constitution as its sacred texts, and the State as its teaching church. It is
to this religion, and no other, that every citizen is expected to conform. It
is the only objective “truth” in the public sphere.
I think that
it would be a serious mistake to for those of us resisting the growing tyranny
inside the beltway to rely on the Supreme Court to provide any serious
assistance. Neither the Court nor the Congress seems to have the intestinal
fortitude to confront the lawlessness of our Imperial Executive.
As we think
and pray about the status quo, we need to keep Jesus’ word in John 14.6:
Jesus said to him, “I am the way,
and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through
me.” ESV
He is the way--without Him there is no true going.
He is the truth—without Him there is no true knowing.
He is the life—without Him there is no true growing.
In America today, politically correct
autonomous man is diligently attempting to insure that all that takes place is
“without Him.”
Woe to those who call evil good
and good evil,
who put darkness for light
and light for darkness,
who put bitter for sweet
and sweet for bitter!
Isaiah 5.20 ESV
Jerry
Sweers
cmudgeon@windstream.net
Archive: http://crmudgeon.blogspot.com
2/19/2014
DENMARK
GOAFS II: #82
DENMARK
2.19.14
'
Having sent
you “Love in the Mist” on Valentine’s Day, I must get back to my general theme
lately--The Imperial Presidency,
Progressive Liberalism, and the Religion of Multiculturalism / Political
Correctness. The following article is by Susan MacAllen. She would appear
to be a Canadian but Snopes thinks the name is an alias and infers this
“anti-Muslim rant” is fiction but gives no proof. There is a lot of dispute on
the Google on both sides of the argument. If Snopes doesn’t like it, I would
suggest it is probably true, since Snopes is highly unreliable on anything
casting aspersions on progressive liberalism.
It not would
be surprising if the name is an alias, given the predisposition of Islam to
kill those who disagree with it or criticize it. It is consistent with all I know about the
nature of Islamic expansion, but I have to report and leave it to you to
decide. Politifact.com has nothing on this person.
***************
Salute the Danish Flag - it's a Symbol of
Western Freedom
By Susan MacAllen
In 1978-9 I was
living and studying in Denmark. But in 1978 - even in
Copenhagen, one
didn't see Muslim immigrants.
The Danish
population embraced visitors, celebrated the exotic, went out of
its way to protect
each of its citizens. It was proud of its new brand of
socialist
liberalism one in development since the conservatives had lost
power in 1929 - a
system where no worker had to struggle to survive, where
one ultimately
could count upon the state as in, perhaps, no other western
nation at
the time.
The rest of
Europe saw the Scandinavians as free-thinking, progressive and
infinitely
generous in their welfare policies. Denmark boasted low crime
rates, devotion
to the environment, a superior educational system and a
history of
humanitarianism.
Denmark was also
most generous in its immigration policies - it offered
the best welcome
in Europe to the new immigrant: generous welfare payments
from first
arrival plus additional perks in transportation, housing and
education. It was
determined to set a world example for inclusiveness and
multiculturalism.
How could it have predicted that one day in 2005 a series
of political
cartoons in a newspaper would spark violence that would leave
dozens dead in
the streets - all because its commitment to multiculturalism
would come back
to bite?
By the 1990s the
growing urban Muslim population was obvious - and its
unwillingness to
integrate into Danish society was obvious. Years of
immigrants had
settled into Muslim-exclusive enclaves. As the Muslim
leadership became
more vocal about what they considered the decadence of
Denmark's liberal
way of life, the Danes - once so welcoming - began to feel
slighted. Many
Danes had begun to see Islam as incompatible with their
long-standing
values: belief in personal liberty and free speech, equality
for women,
tolerance for other ethnic groups, and a deep pride in Danish
heritage and
history.
An article by
Daniel Pipes and Lars Hedegaard, forecasted accurately that the growing immigrant
problem in Denmark would explode. They reported:
'Muslim
immigrants constitute 5 percent of the population but consume
upwards of 40
percent of the welfare spending.'
'Muslims are only
4 percent of Denmark's 5.4 million people but make up a
majority of the
country's convicted rapists, an especially combustible issue
given that
practically all the female victims are non-Muslim. Similar, if
lesser,
disproportions are found in other crimes.'
'Over time, as
Muslim immigrants increase in numbers, they wish less to mix
with the
indigenous population. A recent survey finds that only 5 percent
of young Muslim
immigrants would readily marry a Dane.'
'Forced marriages
- promising a newborn daughter in Denmark to a male
cousin in the
home country, then compelling her to marry him, sometimes on
pain of death -
are one problem.'
'Muslim leaders
openly declare their goal of introducing Islamic law once
Denmark's Muslim
population grows large enough - a not-that-remote prospect.
If present trends
persist, one sociologist estimates, every third inhabitant
of Denmark in 40
years will be Muslim.'
It is easy to
understand why a growing number of Danes would feel that
Muslim immigrants
show little respect for Danish values and laws.
An example is the
phenomenon common to other European countries and
Canada: some
Muslims in Denmark who opted to leave the Muslim faith have
been murdered in
the name of Islam, while others hide in fear for their
lives. Jews are
also threatened and harassed openly by Muslim leaders in
Denmark, a
country where once Christian citizens worked to smuggle out
nearly all of
their 7,000 Jews by night to Sweden - before the Nazis could
invade. I think
of my Danish friend Elsa - who, as a teenager, had dreaded
crossing the
street to the bakery every morning under the eyes of occupying
Nazi soldiers -
and I wonder what she would say today.
In 2001, Denmark
elected the most conservative government in some 70 years
- one that had
some decidedly non-generous ideas about liberal unfettered
immigration. Today,
Denmark has the strictest immigration policies in
Europe . (Its
effort to protect itself has been met with accusations of
'racism' by
liberal media across Europe - even as other governments struggle
to right the
social problems wrought by years of too-lax immigration.)
If you wish to
become Danish, you must attend three years of language
classes. You must
pass a test on Denmark's history, culture, and a Danish
language test.
You must live in
Denmark for 7 years before applying for citizenship.
You must
demonstrate an intent to work, and have a job waiting. If you wish
to bring a spouse
into Denmark , you must both be over 24 years of age, and
you won't find it
so easy anymore to move your friends and family to
Denmark with you.
You will not be
allowed to build a mosque in Copenhagen, although your
children have a
choice of some 30 Arabic culture and language schools in
Denmark , they
will be strongly encouraged to assimilate to Danish society
in ways that past
immigrants weren't.
In 2006, the Danish
minister for employment, Claus Hjort Frederiksen,
spoke publicly of
the burden of Muslim immigrants on the Danish welfare
system, and it
was horrifying: the government's welfare committee had
calculated that
if immigration from Third World countries were blocked, 75
percent of the
cuts needed to sustain the huge welfare system in coming
decades would be
unnecessary. In other words, the welfare system, as it
existed, was
being exploited by immigrants to the point of eventually
bankrupting the
government. 'We are simply forced to adopt a new policy on
immigration.'
'The calculations
of the welfare committee are terrifying and show how
unsuccessful the
integration of immigrants has been up to now,' he said.
A large thorn in
the side of Denmark's imams is the Minister of Immigration
and Integration,
Rikke Hvilshoj. She makes no bones about the new policy
toward
immigration, 'The number of foreigners coming to the country makes a
difference,'
Hvilshoj says, 'There is an inverse correlation between how
many come here
and how well we can receive the foreigners that come.' And
on Muslim
immigrants needing to demonstrate a willingness to blend in, 'In
my view, Denmark
should be a country with room for different cultures and
religions. Some
values, however, are more important than others. We refuse
to question
democracy, equal rights, and freedom of speech.'
Hvilshoj has paid
a price for her show of backbone. Perhaps to test her
resolve, the
leading radical imam in Denmark, Ahmed Abdel Rahman Abu Laban, demanded that the government pay blood
money to the family of a Muslim who was murdered in a suburb of Copenhagen,
stating that the family's thirst for revenge could be thwarted for money. When
Hvilshoj dismissed his demand, he argued that in Muslim culture the payment of
retribution money was
common, to which
Hvilshoj replied that what is done in a Muslim country is
not necessarily
what is done in Denmark.
The Muslim reply
came soon after: her house was torched while she, her
husband and
children slept. All managed to escape unharmed, but she and her
family were moved
to a secret location and she and other ministers were
assigned
bodyguards for the first time - in a country where such murderous
violence was once
so scarce.
Her government
has slid to the right, and her borders have tightened. Many
believe that what
happens in the next decade will determine whether Denmark
survives as a
bastion of good living, humane thinking and social
responsibility,
or whether it becomes a nation at civil war with supporters
of Sharia law.
And meanwhile,
Canadians clamour for stricter immigration policies, and
demand an end to
state welfare programs that allow many immigrants to live
on the public
dole. As we in Canada look at the enclaves of Muslims amongst
us, and see those
who enter our shores too easily, dare live on our taxes,
yet refuse to
embrace our culture, respect our traditions, participate in
our legal system,
obey our laws, speak our language, appreciate our history.
We would do well
to look to Denmark, and say a prayer for her future and for
our own.
*************
This is a
case history well worth noting as our Imperial Executive speaks of pursuing a
“comprehensive immigration” policy and occasionally makes vague positive
allusions to “sharia compliance” in America. We could well look to Denmark for
some good rules and especially some careful attention to the danger of
expanding the progressive liberal voting base with no real effort to control
the borders or requiring a decent level of proper assimilation.
Jerry
Sweers
cmudgeon@windstream.net
Archive: http://crmudgeon.blogspot.com
2/12/2014
THE SAME GOD?
GOAFS II: #81
THE SAME GOD?
2.12.14
'
It seems like
my blogs are pretty grim these days. I will try to send you a flower on
Valentine’s Day to lighten things up.
Last summer
New York’s Timothy Cardinal Dolan paid a visit to the Albanian Islamic Cultural
Center in Tompkinsville on Staten Island. It was not a pastoral visit. He went
to meet a large group of Muslim leaders. For Dolan, it was an attempt to find
or build common ground with Islam. For the Muslims, it was an attempt to gain
the support of this prominent Cardinal in their campaign to eliminate the
counter-terrorism program put into place by the New York Police Department in
the wake of 9/11.
Part of this
program involves the monitoring of suspected mosques and Muslim Student
Association (MSA) Chapters. The surveillance seems justified in light of the
fact that mosques and MSAs have proven themselves to be incubators of
Islamic radicalism.
According to
four separate studies, approximately 80% of all mosques convey a supremacist
vision and provide their members with anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, pro-sharia, and pro-jihad literature. Many of the radical Jihadist leaders were
sheltered, nurtured, and trained in these mosques and MSAs at various
universities.
Muslim
leaders have characterized this anti-terrorist program as an attack on
religions freedom. They have already succeeded in recruiting Christian
interfaith partners (like The Baptist Joint Committee on Religious Freedom).
Their efforts would be greatly enhanced if they could get a Cardinal on their
side.
These Muslims
in New York, as in many other parts of the country, are waging “silent jihad,”
an all-out culture war on all fronts. They have little political power and no
military power in America at this time but they are working towards a goal
stated in a secret paper written in 1991 by a member of the Board of Directors
of the Muslim Brotherhood of North America and obtained later on by the FBI.
This document sets forth the group’s mission as:
“a grand jihad in
eliminating and destroying Western Civilization from within and’ sabotaging’
its miserable house by their hands
and the hands of believers.”
By their hands is shorthand for the actions of useful idiots in America. It is a
reflection of the truth of what Arnold Toynbee once wrote; “An autopsy of
history would show that all great nations commit suicide.” It also suggests the
author had a good grasp of the Western penchant for cooperating in its own
undoing. Cardinal Dolan is one of these useful idiots. In his talk to the Muslim
leaders he said,
“You love God, we love God, and He is the same God.”
He goes on to
say that the Catholics and the Muslims have very much in common:
“Your love of marriage and family, your love of children and
babies, your love of freedom—religious freedom particularly—your defense of
life, your desire for harmony and unity and your care for others, your care for
God’s creation and your care for those who are in need.”
There is not
time to examine these ludicrous assertions--so let’s just take this first one
for example—‘He is the same God.” In a broad sense there is, after all, only
one God. Whether prayer and worship are being offered to our Father in Heaven
or to Allah or to the Great Spirit, there is only one God who is paying attention.
In this sense, anyone who is offering up prayers is praying to the same God.
How God regards those prayers is not the same. “God be merciful to me, the
sinner,” prayed by the Publican (Luke 18.13) is heard and regarded differently
than “Allahu Akbar” prayed by the suicide bomber before he blows himself up
along with a room full of innocent “infidels.”
In the New
Testament God presents Himself as a Triune Being (Matt 28.19); in the Koran,
Allah consistently denies being a trinity (surah 5:73). In the Gospels, God
refers to Jesus as “my beloved Son” (Matt 3.17); in the Koran, Allah curses
Christians for calling Christ the Son of God (surah 9:30). In the Christian
account, God accepts His only Son’s sacrificial death on the cross; in the
Muslim account, Allah declares reports of Christ’s crucifixion to be “a
monstrous falsehood” (surah 4:157) There is much more here but simply on the
basis of these differences it is hard to make the case for the Christian God
and the Muslim Allah being the same God.
So if
Cardinal Dolan is not a useful idiot yet, he is well on the way to join other
useful idiots like The Baptist Joint Committee on Religious Freedom. I would
guess that the new Mayor of New York is also in this crowd. There is nothing
stealth jihadists like better than a socialist welfare environment with the
police muzzled and easy immigration. They can flood the city, multiply like
rabbits, live off welfare, and even eventually elect a Muslim mayor and City
Council that would make every effort to replace constitutional law with sharia
law the law in the City of New York.
Whether they
get this far or not, sharia law is
gaining ground in many large cities, and inside the beltway as well. If you
don’t know what sharia law is, I
suggest you do some research—it may be coming to your neighborhood sooner than
you think.
Of course,
you know I have to get to the current grand champion of the useful idiots, our
Imperial President and his vast army of socialist progressive bureaucrats. The
present administration never misses an opportunity to call “The Little Sisters
of the Poor” or “Hobby Lobby” into court where they will be pressured to
violate their consciences in the name of political correctness. At the same
time this same administration would rather eat excrement than actually call a
terrorist a terrorist.
There are
long lists floating around the internet of the aggressive actions by this
administration has taken in marginalizing the Catholic Church and other
Christian groups. At the same time, there are countless government attempts to
be so “nice” to Islam that not one Muslim could possibly have hurt feelings.
For example,
in 2011 Muslim Brotherhood-linked groups such as the Council on
American-Islamic Relations and the Islamic Society of North America managed to
convince the compliant Obama administration to purge the training programs of
all the national security agencies of material judged to be “biased” against
Islam. The FBI, the CIA, the NSA, the Defense Department, the Department of
Homeland Security—17 agencies all together—were forbidden from drawing any
connection between the doctrine, law and scripture of Islam and Islamic
terrorism. At the behest of Muslim leaders, our national security apparatus
willingly blinded and hobbled itself to the threat from Islam.
The result ,
on numerous occasions, has been that federal agents have been forced to ignore
intelligence that might well have thwarted terrorist attacks. The FBI’s
inability to utilize Russian intelligence reports on Tamerlane Tsarnaev, one of
the Boston Marathon bombers, is a case in point.
This sort of
thing suggests a spirit of paranoid fear in the present administration—not of
the deadly acts of the homicidal Sons of Allah, but of the sin of some kind of
profiling, the only unforgivable sin in the religion of political correctness.
In a book
review by Charles Cook on “Inventing Freedom: How The English People Made The
Modern World,” Daniel Hannan, (a prominent British member of the European
Parliament) Cook writes that Hannan warns his readers in the West are:
“…at risk of squandering a beautiful and rare inheritance—the
product of 1,100 year’s work, no less. As one might imagine, The European Union
comes in for some choice words, as does Barack
Obama, whose agenda Hannan regards as an
existential threat to American liberty, and whose worldview belittles the ‘Anglo-Saxon values [that] made
possible the transformation of our planet over the past three centuries.’”
Daniel Hannan
is someone Americans should read—perhaps something of a prophet even. His
previous book on these things is “The New Road to Serfdom: A Letter of Warning
to America.”
In America
apologists for Islam point out the many Muslims who are American citizens, our
co-workers, neighbors or friends—the allegedly “peaceful Muslims.” This
observation is only half true. The Muslim who is fully aware of, observant of
and committed to the doctrine, law and scripture of Islam is not a peaceful
Muslim—he is a faithful Muslim. All
over the middle east faithful Muslims are busy killing what we call in America
peaceful Muslims along with other infidels. America is a good place for
Muslims—with freedoms and benefits they have never experienced where Islam is
in charge. But we need to keep in mind these facts from a study done by Wenzel
Strategies:
1. 58% of
Muslim-American citizens believe criticism of Islam or Muhammad should not be
allowed under the U.S. Constitution.
2. 46% believe that
Americans who criticize or parody Islam should face criminal charges. One in
eight respondents believe such crimes merit the death penalty.
3. 42% believe that
Americans should not have the right to evangelize Muslims.
For a
faithful Muslim, religious freedom largely means two things:
1. Freedom to practice
“sharia” (32 % of those surveyed believed that “sharia” should be the supreme
law of the land in the U.S.)
2. Freedom from
criticism.
None of this
is intended to make our neighbors our enemies. The Christian has a commandment
of Jesus to love his neighbor as himself. Further, there are no exceptions—my
neighbor is he whom I meet with a need I am able to supply. There is no needier
person in the world than a Muslim who has never heard the gospel and believed
it.
Jerry
Sweers
cmudgeon@windstream.net
Archive: http://crmudgeon.blogspot.com
